Hi all.
This could be a long one. I haven’t devoted a lot of headspace to this situation since it happened because I found it very traumatic and I feel as though I have unresolved scars.
So here it goes....
8 years ago I discovered I was pregnant following a huge bleed that wasn’t my period. For context, I was young then, 19 years old. I consulted my doctor who presumed this was a miscarriage and referred me for a scan to check that this was correct and that everything had left my body as it should have. I had an internal scan at the hospital where the consultant in that department and most experienced (as told by my doctor) confirmed that in fact she wasn’t sure if this was a miscarriage or not as there was a sac visible on the screen but she couldn’t see it in enough detail to confirm. She mentioned it could’ve just been that my body hadn’t got rid of everything and this was retained from where the embryo was. I was sent away and booked in for another scan in 10 days time to see if it had grown and in the meantime my bloods were taken on two occasions to check if my HCG levels increased which the midwife in the early pregnancy unit confirmed that they had in fact increased as expected in a normal pregnancy.
Anyway, I arrived after 10 days for my second scan and the same lady as before scanned me internally again and said the sac has in fact grown in size but not by the amount she would’ve expected it to in that time and that she couldn’t see anything on the screen to indicate this was a live and viable pregnancy. She pondered for a very long time over this and seemed totally confused but eventually decided this was not a growing foetus and was abnormal retention after the miscarriage. So a surgical procedure was booked in to get rid of it to stop infections etc. She printed pictures and gave them to me of the scan screen (for reasons unknown).
She informed me that she thought it could've been a molar pregnancy and asked if I would consent to the remaining product of my non viable/miscarried pregnancy to a lab to confirm this after the procedure and I agreed to this.
So I had the procedure and about a month after I received a phone call from my doctor explaining that I will be receiving a very ‘disturbing’ letter through the post that morning (she had been sent a copy and just opened it). She explained that the lab found that the pregnancy was in fact perfectly viable and was a ‘normal’ growing foetus. At the time I felt numb as if my choice of a pregnancy was stripped away from me and I basically had an abortion but unknowingly. I was young at the time and just accepted that this had happened but now I look back it angers me a lot actually. I remember how uncertain the lady scanning me was and it does disturb me that this decision was made based on a bunch, despite my HCG levels increasing and the fact that the sack had grown.
I have never spoken about this to family and friends other than to inform them what had happened as I was going through it but I think about this a lot and don’t feel as though I’ve healed.
Am I wrong in feeling so angry at what happened to me?